Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Give the assist to Chuckwagon Boy

My friend and former B of A colleague Paul, a/k/a Chuckwagon Boy, points us to Walter Russell Mead's apt summation of why the AGW movement has gone off the rails:

The climate change movement now needs to regroup, and at some point it will have to confront a central, unpalatable fact: the wounds from which it is bleeding so profusely are mostly its own fault. This phase of the climate change movement was immature, unrealistic and naive. It was poorly organized and foolishly led. It adopted an unrealistic and unreachable political goal, and sought to stampede world opinion through misleading and exaggerated statements. It lacked the most elementary level of political realism–all the more egregious given the movement’s politically sophisticated and very rich opponents. Foundation staff, activists and sympathetic journalists cocooned themselves in an echo chamber of comfortable group-think, and as they toasted one another in green Kool-Aid they thought they were making progress when actually they were slowly and painfully digging themselves into an ever-deeper hole.

There's a lot more, including Mead's suggestion of a particular scapegoat. As we say in the blogosphere, read the whole thing. And while you're at it, don't miss out on another Mead piece in which he uses a word that we're rather fond of 'round here.